The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Hope Theatre has staged a coup in hosting the first UK production of Jen Silverman's The Moors. The play may be bizarre in places, but it is never dull. Phil Bartlett directs the show with ingenuity and precision. The play toys with certain tropes of 19th century...
At 6.30 pm on 18th August 1823, Jack Gladstone walked up to the large bell that hung at the centre of the sugar plantation, and rang it. This was the signal for the start of the Demerara uprising, that would become the largest revolt against British slavery up to that...
The Huxleys. I like to think of nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and his twentieth-century zoologist grandson Julian as one very long-lived man. This Huxley lived from 1825–1975. Controversial exponent and explainer of evolution by natural selection,...
What's My Poison? ‘It is clear that the “favourite” poison with us is arsenic.’ So wrote Charles Dickens in his journal, Household Words, in December 1851. Dickens argues for the enforcement of laws regulating the sale of medicines. Dickens refers to the Sale of...
Five Questions on War: 1. Does our biology explain why we have war? I say No: war is not engrained in us (but feel free to disagree with me and lots will). Biology might explain why we sometimes lash out violently when we are angry or afraid, but not why we have...
‘… the sufferings of which were dreadful … when I awoke with that horror upon me …’ Charles Dickens had a cold. Man flu? One might wonder when reading the dramatic description of his anguish. But he was a novelist given to melodrama at times, and, considering the...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryTimothy Ashby Author of Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593)At the top of my favourites list of recent historical books is Leanda de Lisle´s The White King. Although non-fiction, the book reads...
CVHF Highlights So Far Monday 20th June Power & Privilege: A Recent History Simon Kuper (author of Chums) & Richard Beard (Sad Little Men) discussed the corrosive impact of public schools and Oxford University on recent British political life. Their discussion...
Three years ago, while standing at the urinal in The Gallery pub in Pimlico, it suddenly struck me that if I didn’t see a nightingale or a turtledove soon, I probably never would. It isn’t the sort of place I usually have revelations but three pints in, I was hung up...
Kissinger on Ukraine In his doctoral thesis, published in 1957 as A World Restored. Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Henry Kissinger put up a strong defence of the settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna. He argued that as there could...
